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dimanche 6 avril 2014

Five Ways to Convince Executives of the Value of Project Management (Part 2 of 2)

A lire sur: Method123

Project management practices provide value to all organizations. The exact argument to use for
convincing executives is going to be different from company to company because every
company has a unique culture and unique problems they face. But some
common benefits should be achieved in all organizations.

Better Estimating, Planning and Project Definition

How many times have you heard about or been involved in a
project that was not as successful
as it needed to be. Did you ever spend time looking back to see what
caused the project to go wrong? If you did, chances are that you said,
"You know, we should have spent more time planning."

Project management focuses first on planning the work.
This is a vital discipline, and allows the project team and the customer
to have common perceptions of what the project is going to deliver, when
it will be complete, what it will cost, who will do the work and how the
work will be done.

Value statement: Utilizing a project definition and
planning process sets realistic expectations, establishes the path to
success and makes sure that only the
right work gets done.

Reuse of Processes and Templates

People intuitively understand that it is faster and
cheaper to reuse something that already exists rather than to build
something similar from scratch. If your organization creates a set of
project management processes and templates that are used consistently
from project to project, each instance represents a savings of time that
would otherwise have been spent on building the processes from scratch.

Value statement: Utilizing common project management
processes and templates will result in cost and time savings associated
with having to otherwise develop them from scratch on each project.

Proactive Project Management Processes

People who complain that project management is a lot of
'overhead' forget the alternative. Your project is going to face issues. The
question is whether you will proactively resolve them or figure them out
as you go. Your project will face potential risks. Will you try to
resolve them before they happen, or wait until the problems arise? Are
you going to communicate proactively or deal with misunderstandings
caused by lack of project information?

The characteristics of the project are not all going to
change whether you use a formal project management process. What
changes is how the events are dealt with when the project is in
progress. Are they dealt with haphazardly and reactively, or proactively
with a smoothly running process?

Value statement: Having proactive
processes in place will allow you to anticipate what will happen on the
project and be prepared for various contingencies. This will ultimately help projects run faster, cheaper and
at a higher quality level.

More Effective Communication

If stakeholders are not kept informed of the project
status,
there is a much greater chance of difficulties due to
differing expectations. In fact, in many cases where conflicts
arise, it is not because of the actual problem, but because people were surprised.

Practicing simple quality management helps you deliver to a
higher level of quality and avoid the expense and time of having to fix
things after the fact. This helps avoid quality problems and rework that
surface toward the end of the project.

Value statement: Quality management helps you build
your deliverables correctly the first time and saves time and costs by
discovering problems as early in the project as possible.

Summary

is not possible to give an exact set of arguments that
will convince executives at every company. The arguments you use for one
company might fall completely flat at another company. However,
regardless of your situation today, the basic value points above
probably hold true in every company.